If aliens sent an exploratory mission to Earth, one of the first things they’d notice — after the fluffy white clouds and blue oceans of our water world — would be the way vegetation grades from exuberance at the equator through moderation at mid-latitudes toward monotony at higher ones. We all learn about this biodiversity gradient in school, but why does it exist?

Between the start of 1997 and the end of 2014, average global surface temperature stalled. This 18-year period is known as the global warming pause, also sometimes referred to as the global warming hiatus. The rise in global temperatures that alarmed climate campaigners in the 1990s had slowed so much that the trend was no longer statistically significant. It has been the subject of much research and debate in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Sea level alarmists often claim that the rate of sea level rise is increasing. They need to do this to convince the public that the innocuous 7” or so of sea level rise experienced in the 20thC is suddenly going to turn into meters by 2100.

One of the many conundrums facing climate alarmists — who predict that dangerous future global warming will result from increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2 — is the existence of the aptly-named “warming hiatus.” Also referred to as the “warming pause,” this phenomenon describes a nearly two-decade-long leveling off of global temperatures despite a ten percent increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration since 1998. The significance of these observations resides in the fact that all climate models project that temperatures should not be levelling off, but should be increasing (despite interannual variability) in direct consequence of the ongoing rise in atmospheric CO2.

Using a technique called ‘seismic noise interferometry’ combined with geophysical measurements, the researchers measured the energy moving through a volcano. They found that there is a good correlation between the speed at which the energy travelled and the amount of bulging and shrinking observed in the rock. The technique could be used to predict more accurately when a volcano will erupt. Their results are reported in the journal Science Advances.

We hear that global warming is highly dependent on the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, this gas that is required to sustain life on Earth and that is also emitted when burning flammable stuff, such as wood, coal, mineral and organic oils, or methane.

If you are told “this depends on that”, you are invited to examine available data observed over time to draw a representation of this on the y-axis vs. that on the x-axis.

So, in all logic, you should be interested in a representation of the temperature evolution in dependence of the atmospheric CO2 concentration.

Yes, you should, but, looking hard into the latest IPCC Report (the fifth of Working Group I, to be precise), no diagram of that sort can be found among its 1535 pages.

The study found that dispersants broke up the oil into tiny droplets, making them less buoyant and unable to float to the surface. This meant that the oil formed a layer deep below the surface of the water, making it easier for microbes that live in the deep ocean to eat it. However, scientists weren’t able to measure the exact amount of oil eliminated by the microbes.

Due largely to these oil-eating bacteria, the Gulf of Mexico recovered from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill faster than scientists thought possible and has returned to pre-spill levels of environmental health.

Earth is estimated to be around 4.5 billion years old, with life first appearing around 3 billion years ago.

To unravel this incredible history, scientists use a range of different techniques to determine when and where continents moved, how life evolved, how climate changed over time, when our oceans rose and fell, and how land was shaped. Tectonic plates – the huge, constantly moving slabs of rock that make up the outermost layer of the Earth, the crust – are central to all these studies.

Along with our colleagues, we have published the first whole-Earth plate tectonic map of half a billion years of Earth history, from 1,000 million years ago to 520 million years ago.

The Eurasian ice sheet was an enormous conveyor of ice that covered most of northern Europe some 23,000 years ago. Its extent was such that one could have skied 4,500 km continuously across it – from the far southwestern isles in Britain to Franz Josef Land in the Siberian Arctic. Suffice to say its existence had a massive and extremely hostile impact on Europe at the time.

This ice sheet alone lowered global sea-level by over 20 meters. As it melted and collapsed, it caused severe flooding across the continent, led to dramatic sea-level rise, and diverted mega-rivers that raged on the continent. A new model, investigating the retreat of this ice sheet and its many impacts has just been published in Quaternary Science Reviews.

For the past two years, U. Alberta geophysicist Mirko Van der Baan and his team have been poring over 30 to 50 years of earthquake rates from six of the top hydrocarbon-producing states in the United States and the top three provinces by output in Canada: North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, West Virginia, Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan.

With only one exception, the scientists found no province- or state-wide correlation between increased hydrocarbon production and seismicity. They also discovered that human-induced seismicity is less likely in areas that have fewer natural earthquakes.

Until cloud and precipitation data are adequate AND accounted for properly AND the error bands are low enough to cover 1/10 degree increments, we can’t say there is ANY effect from CO2 on temperature. It is at most a conjecture, and not a very good one. You can not ignore the major driver of changes of temperatures (as shown in the above graph) and then attribute temperature changes to something else by supposition.

Some are adamant that the “hiatus” does not and never has existed, and will never change their minds. But the evidence is irrefutable. As a large number of influential climate scientists have just said in the journal Nature Geoscience, since the turn of the century there has been a substantial slowdown in warming that computer climate models did not predict or can explain. In fact, such models predict a warming twice that observed.